Thursday, November 30, 2017

Being as this is a conservative blog, I try to respect
tradition. Even my own invented traditions.

Long time readers know that I have kicked off my annual
fundraising campaign on Cyber Monday. The campaign will last for the week, so
you will likely see this same post repeated again and again as the week goes
on. Brace yourself.

It might not seem like it, but it takes considerable work to
produce these posts every day. For those who wish to support and even reward my
efforts I recommend a donation. It’s thoroughly in keeping with the holiday
spirit. As they say: It's more blessed to give than to receive.

If you click on the orange Donate button on
the left side of this page, the kind folks at Paypal will help you to
contribute as much as you would like.

If you do not wish to use Paypal, I gratefully accept checks
or cash or even Bitcoin sent to my address:

310 East 46th St. 24H

New York, NY 10017

If you have a friend or a relative who is a psychoanalyst or
who still clings to Freudian theory, you would be doing him a great favor by
sending a copy of my book, The Last Psychoanalyst. It’s
the perfect holiday gift. See the link at left.

Another week, another case for Ask Polly. In the interest of
enlightenment I will ignore what Polly says. Polly doesn’t have any more of a clue about the current case than she has about most other cases. As it happens, the letter presents an interesting description of a case of social anomie.

And Polly cannot even recommend that the woman letter writer
Rebel Without a Man see a therapist. In truth, RWM does see someone she calls a
great therapist. One can only wonder how her great therapist seems not to have solved anything. One continues to be amazed by the fact that patients rarely care about whether therapy is solving a problem or even
addressing the salient issues. I suspect that the therapist is showering RWM
with empathy; surely she feels her pain. In the great scheme of things, this is
useless and worthless.

Apparently, RWM spent ten years in New York City developing
a New York City persona, the kind of persona that is legal tender in the Big
Apple. Then, for reasons that are never explained, she moved back to Texas and
discovered that her New York persona was off putting. Especially to men. She might
as well have been dousing herself in essence of man repellent.

Naturally, she believes that the New York persona is who she
really is, and that she should never discard it. And yet, it is a persona like
another, an artificial construct that she cobbled together to fulfill the needs
and expectations of hip New York.

One suspects that someone—guess who?—told her that her bold,
brassy, drunk, careerist, funny persona would be irresistible to men.
Apparently, such is not the case. Her persona repels men… and she does not
understand why. She curses like a drunken sailor and speaks her mind… and does
not understand why men are not flocking to her door. One suspects that she also
hooks up… and is finding that the men in her new neighborhood do not respect
her for as much.

She is 34, successful in her career, not needing a man for
anything more than appearance sake, and, despite the promises laid out by
certain ideologically driven thinkers, she is finding that men do not want her.
And she is also finding that her female friends, presumably women she had grown
up with, do not care to hang out with her. They married young, have children
and do not need to be entertained by her tired and self-indulgent persona.

Naturally, she also believes that her fellow Texans are
intimidated by her outspoken ambitious persona. I promise you and her that
demeaning other people for not accepting someone who refuses to fit
in is not the royal road to happiness, or even to marriage. Given her attitude—take
me as I am or leave me alone—one should not be surprised at her inability to
hold on to a man.

One suspects that she is shocked that her one night stands
do not turn into conjugal bliss, but wherever did anyone get the idea that
being bold, brassy and liberated was the royal road to anything other than
anomie.

Were you to want to address her problem, you would want to
start with the immortal words of St. Ambrose—you remember St. Ambrose, don’t
you?—

When in
Rome do as the Romans do.

If the question were which day to fast, as was the case when
the mother of St. Augustine asked St. Ambrose, things would be easier. RWM
cannot very well go back to being an unmarried feminine twentysomething finding
a husband, settling down and having children.

Here is the better part of her anguished call for help.

I moved
back to Texas after ten years in New York City. Although life is much
easier now, there’s something gnawing at me I can’t shake. I’m a
34-year-old single woman who is career focused, creative, extremely
independent, funny, attractive, etc. BUT I can’t keep a man and the locals
won’t let me forget it!

I’m a
brassy broad; I drink too much, I curse, I say what’s on my mind. I could
get away with that behavior in the big city because everyone was like
that. But these Texas folks are different. They seem to be intimidated
by outspoken, ambitious women. My contemporaries also settled for the
kids/husband/house/car lifestyle in their early 20s, so we don’t have much in
common. I don’t have any of those adult-y things and didn’t care about having
them before I moved home. Now I desperately want them!

The
thing that really bothers me is how people treat me like I’m a sideshow freak
for being single. They make these little comments about my solo status
that, I’m loathe to admit, make me feel incredibly insecure. In NY, most of my
friends didn’t have a partner. But here, I don’t know any singles. Life
passed me by while I serial dated and goofed around, and now I’m paying for
it. I’m completely hyperfocused on the fact I’m alone. I’m terrified
that everyone here thinks something is wrong with me or they suspect I’m a
closeted gay person or a slut. I know I should just live my life and not care,
but I can’t stand feeling misunderstood. It’s gotten to the point where I avoid
social interactions just so I don’t have to field the questions.

Apparently, all of the locals are very, very judgmental.
They think that she must be a closeted gay or a slut. And yet, we do not read a
word about her efforts to modify her persona and to get back in touch with her
feminine mystique. Has she changed the way she dresses, the way she wears her hair? Does she have tattoos? The persona that she takes to be her true self is
effectively a New York based mirage. It’s about time that she saw through it.

We also note that her New York persona was not having very good romantic relationships. It was having bad romantic experiences. Perhaps she had had it with New York and went back to Texas to find something different. From bad romantic relationships she now finds that men are repelled by her.

It’s
really fucking hard dating in your mid-30s. The men here are repelled by
me. I’ve had a lot of bad romantic experiences in the past. Nothing has
stuck. Now I’m so scared I’ll be the town pariah if I never find anyone
that it’s making me depressed and paranoid….

I see
a great therapist about this. But I want stop giving a shit about what
these people think. Part of me is craving to assimilate. I used to be such a
badass rebel who enjoyed being the misfit. Now I’m the local oddball and I
hate it. Is there something I can do to make this deep insecurity go
away? How can I stop feeling like a broken, unlovable loser? It’s
exhausting.

As I said, this level of misery and cluelessness does not make
her therapist a great therapist. If she imagines that Polly will provide her
with just the right insight to continue doing what she is doing and not being
treated like the local pariah, then she has gone beyond clueless.

As for the more burning issues, if New York was so great and
if she fit in so well, why did she leave? And, this ambitious,
careerist woman would have done better to share a little information about what
she does for a living. Does she freelance? Does she work for a company? Might
she be doing better if she got a job working in an office, where should could
more easily fit in?

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Being as this is a conservative blog, I try to
respect tradition. Even my own invented traditions.

Long time readers know that I have kicked off my annual
fundraising campaign on Cyber Monday. The campaign will last for the week, so
you will likely see this same post repeated again and again as the week goes
on. Brace yourself.

It might not seem like it, but it takes considerable work to
produce these posts every day. For those who wish to support and even reward my
efforts I recommend a donation. It’s thoroughly in keeping with the holiday
spirit. As they say: It's more blessed to give than to receive.

If you click on the orange Donate button on
the left side of this page, the kind folks at Paypal will help you to
contribute as much as you would like.

If you do not wish to use Paypal, I gratefully accept checks
or cash or even Bitcoin sent to my address:

310 East 46th St. 24H

New York, NY 10017

If you have a friend or a relative who is a psychoanalyst or
who still clings to Freudian theory, you would be doing him a great favor by
sending a copy of my book, The Last Psychoanalyst. It’s
the perfect holiday gift. See the link at left.

Unhappily for all of us, the current wave of exposures of
sexual harassers and even rapists has brought forth the usual suspects: psycho
professionals who are happy to offer their services to treat the miscreants.

Some say that men like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Brett
Ratner and Al Franken are sex addicts. In the case of Tiger Woods I disputed the point myself several years ago. In other cases the Washington Post has
argued that these men are responsible for their behavior and do not suffer from
an addiction.

As for the therapy on offer for sexually deviant behavior,
we must recognize that there are different kinds of sexual
misbehavior. While news reports about such behaviors often recommend counseling
or therapy, as though these are going to solve the problem by washing them in a
warm bath of empathy and insight, the truth is, Benedict Carey reports in the
New York Times, that for the most part therapists can only offer a patchwork of
approaches, none of which is especially effective.

We are grateful to Carey for presenting an outcome-based
assessment of therapy approaches and sparing us the psychobabble about feeling
our feelings.

Carey presents the current status of treatments for sexual
misbehavior:

Whatever
mix of damage control and contrition they represent, pledges like these suggest
that there are standard treatments for perpetrators of sexual offenses. In
fact, no such standard treatments exist, experts say. Even the notion of
“sexual addiction” as a stand-alone diagnosis is in dispute.

“There
are no evidence-based programs I know of for the sort of men who have been in
the news recently,” said Vaile Wright, director of research and special
projects at the American Psychological Association.

That
doesn’t mean that these men cannot change their ways with professional help.

He continues:

The
evidence that talk therapy and medication can curb sexual misconduct is modest
at best, and virtually all of it comes from treating severe disorders, like
pedophilia and exhibitionism, experts said — powerful urges that cannot be
turned off.

Still,
there is reason to think that these therapeutic approaches can be adapted to
treatment of the men accused of offenses ranging from unwanted attention to
rape.

Again, some severe criminal sexual disorders can be
controlled with medication, but not very many and not very well. There is a chasm between
unwanted attention and rape… so count me as skeptical of any treatment that pretends
to help both of them.

As for the different types of sexual misbehavior, some do
lend themselves to treatment:

The
first group includes the college student failing out because he spends all his
time surfing porn sites, or the man who is visiting prostitutes so often it’s
threatening his livelihood and health.

Therapists
treat these types much as they would substance abusers: with 12-step programs;
group counseling sessions; and by teaching classic impulse-control techniques,
like avoiding friends, social situations and places like bars that put them at
high risk of repeating the behavior.

The
services offered resemble those for other kinds of compulsive behavior, like
gambling and drug use. There are life coaches, couples counselors and
hypnotherapists, as well as residential clinics with names like Promises and
Gentle Path at the Meadows.

Such behaviors are addictive. In some cases people who are
addicted to pornography can cure their addiction by ceasing to watch
pornography. If such behaviors become uncontrollable, then therapists use 12
Step programs.

Still, we should not be overly optimistic. Carey notes:

It is
not at all clear how well such addiction-based approaches work — if at all. And
that’s especially true for men in the more serious offender category, who are
more likely to respond to confrontation, experts said.

Interestingly, he adds that shaming offenders—through public
exposure-- often brings them to their senses. Considering that so many psycho
professionals believe that guilt is the only sanction that causes people to
change their behavior—see Monday’s post—it is good to see that many members of
the profession understand that shaming is far more likely to change behaviors.

Admittedly, the therapists do not call it shame, but you will
understand clearly what is at stake:

“Confrontation
itself — being busted or outed, as so many are now publicly — is enough to
curtail or end the behavior in many cases,” particularly when the offender has
a lot to lose in terms of money and standing, said James Cantor, director of
the Toronto Sexuality Center.

Of course, some therapists want their patients to feel
empathy, but there is no real evidence that this works very well. Besides, as
we have pointed out, following Paul Bloom, a man’s empathy for a man who has been
accused of sexual misconduct and who has been pilloried in the press might just become very angry at women:

The
evidence is weak for empathy training in offenders, through techniques like
role-playing and taking a potential victim’s point of view, said Michael Seto,
director of forensic rehabilitation research at the Royal Ottawa Health Care
Group.

In many cases, therapy serves as little more than a “ruse”
to provoke sympathy, to quiet the outcry and to prepare the miscreant “to
return to the fold:”

But
only if the harasser is willing, committed and genuinely humbled is therapy
likely to be anything more than a ruse to buy some sympathy — and worse,
perhaps an eventual return to the field.

What to
make of the harasser who is entirely unrepentent? “I don’t think we have a
diagnosis yet,” said Dr. Cantor. “And we certainly don’t have a treatment.”

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Many
students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens.
Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people
acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not
an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion.
It’s a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them
down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual
impotence. . . .

Let’s
return to Jefferson’s vision: “For here we are not afraid to follow the truth
wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error as long as reason is left free
to combat it.” Well if Jefferson were to return today and tour our nation’s top
universities, he would be shocked at the culture of fear, the tolerance of
error, and the shackles placed on reason. . . .

If education is now all about power, we can credit
Nietzsche. We see his concept of the “will-to-power” at work in Humanities and some Social Science
departments… where the professoriat has decided to use grade-power to impose
its will on a hapless and defenseless student body.

Being as this is a conservative blog, I make an effort to
respect tradition. Even my own invented traditions.

Long time readers know that I have kicked off my annual fundraising campaign on Cyber Monday. The campaign will last for the
week, so you will likely see this same post repeated again and again as the
week goes on. Brace yourself.

It might not seem like it, but it takes considerable work to
produce these posts every day. For those who wish to support and even reward my
efforts I recommend a donation. It’s thoroughly in keeping with the holiday
spirit. As they say: It's more blessed to give than to receive.

If you click on the orange Donate button on
the left side of this page, the kind folks at Paypal will help you to
contribute as much as you would like.

If you do not wish to use Paypal, I gratefully accept checks
or cash or even Bitcoin sent to my address:

310 East 46th St. 24H

New York, NY 10017

If you have a friend or a relative who is a psychoanalyst or
who still clings to Freudian theory, you would be doing him a great favor by
sending a copy of my book, The Last Psychoanalyst. It’s the perfect
holiday gift. See the link at left.

In the midst of the warlock hunt for male sexual predators
most sensible voices have recommended that we avoid blaming all men for the
misbehavior, at time felonious, of a few bad men.

It makes perfectly good sense. Most of us avoid generalizing from a few
particulars. And yet, some few cannot wrap their minds around that level of complexity-- they tell us that all men are bad, and very, very bad indeed. After all, if five decades of intense feminist consciousness raising has produced Harvey Weinstein and Charley Rose and Brett Ratner... men must be worse than we all thought.

So say the simple-minded. Among them we must count someone named Stephen Marche. A Canadian essayist, a man whose background is in
literature, Marche has taken to the pages of the New York Times to indict the
male gender, for being as bad as Freud said it was.

When Marche speaks of the unexamined brutality of male libido he shows us that he has been living under a rock. For the past five decades we have been talking about nothing else.

Yes, indeed. You might think that Marche would have
mentioned Darwin, a man of science. Instead, he digs Freud up from his grave
and trots him out to indict the male gender. Men are all criminals. They just
want to copulate with their mothers. They will murder their fathers in order to
gain access to their mothers.

It is an idiotic idea, one that richly deserves the oblivion
to which history has consigned it. Not only is it idiotic. It is not even true.
As Stephen Pinker pointed out in his book How
the Mind Works, familiarity does not breed desire. It breeds disinterest.
Men do not lust after their mothers and sisters. Quite the contrary.

Better yet, Marche recommends that all men emulate someone
called Tucker Max and undertake a course of psychoanalytic treatment, the
better to become decent men. How naïve can you be? How ignorant can you be? If
psychoanalysis is designed to help men and women to get in touch with their
most depraved and degenerate desires, do you really believe that they will
always succeed in controlling their expression? Marche obviously knows nothing
about the history of psychoanalysis in places like France and South America. He
does not understand that the cultures where Freud has thrived have nothing to
do with the code of conduct that defines the British gentleman… or the British
lady.

And, he does not understand that the greatest analysts in
Romance language cultures did not believe in constant repression of incestuous
wishes. They, like Freud, believed that repression would always fail. Their goal
was to displace the desires and to make the world safe for adultery. It’s not quite incest, but it involves
violating a taboo.

If this is Marche’s solution, he should go back to
literature.

His idea, if we dare call it thus, is that after all these
decades of feminist enlightenment and equality—after all, Canada made Justin
Bieber its prime minister and has a feminist foreign policy—men are still just
as bad as they always were… only worse.

It never crosses his diminished intellectual capacity that
feminism might be the problem as much as the solution. He does not quite
understand that hostility against men—which has recently found a second or
third wind—might very well be the problem, not the solution. While feminists
like Marche are regaling us with their display of overt hostility against men
who can fail to notice that this might produce pushback? Why would anyone
imagine that men would take it all lying down? Why would anyone believe that
men would not fight back? Huh?

Marche has not
noticed that we have been conducting a national conversation about male sexual
abuse, male sexual harassment, male sexual molestation, and rape culture. We
have been filling peoples’ minds with images of men
doing horrific things to women and children. Which is, after all, what a good
Freudian would want us to do. Funnily enough, it has not produced an era of
comity or amity between the sexes. It has produced sexual deviants… most
especially among male feminists.

To examine his views a bit more closely, note that Marche
decides that it’s all about men… and all about all men.

He writes:

Through
sheer bulk, the string of revelations about men from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes
to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and, this week, to Charlie Rose
and John Lasseter, have forced men to confront what they hate to think about
most: the nature of men in general. This time the accusations aren’t against
some freak geography teacher, some frat running amok in a Southern college
town. They’re against men of all different varieties, in different industries,
with different sensibilities, bound together, solely, by the grotesquerie of
their sexuality.

After telling us that male libido is “often ugly and dangerous”
he extols the appalling Andrea Dworkin as something of an
authority on male sexuality. From Dworkin Marche gains the idea that the only
good penis is a flaccid penis. In truth, Dworkin believed that sex with men was inevitably rape.

In
1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said that
the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without
violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up
their precious erections,” she wrote. In the third century A.D., it is widely
believed, the great Catholic theologian Origen, working on roughly the same
principle, castrated himself.

In truth, if Origen did in fact castrate himself—the point
has been doubted—it was not because he was a proto-feminist. Apparently, he took a passage from Matthew 19:12 a little too literally. In
case you have forgotten it, here is the text:

For
there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there
are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which
have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake.

Naturally, if you are consumed by righteous zeal, as is
Marche, you start getting things wrong. In his Times op-ed Marche ignores all
customary courtship behaviors, the kinds that were designed to make an
encounter between a young man and a young woman an orderly ritual, and not a
free-for-all. Thanks to feminism we have dispensed with all of the niceties of
courtship and we have found ourselves with a situation that is very bad indeed.

Marche does suggest correctly that romantic love is not a
man’s world. When romance is in question women have a home field advantage. Men
do not control love relationships and do not really want to do so. Marche
could have learned about this in any Darwinian study of male-female
relationships.

As for masculinity, boys develop it by joining sports teams,
military groups and even corporations. March seems to believe that men are
alone with their masculinity. Evidently, he is blind to reality.

In his words:

Very
often, when I interview men, it is the first time they have ever discussed
intimate questions seriously with another man....

There
is sex education for boys, but once you leave school the traditional demands on
masculinity return: show no vulnerability, solve your own problems. Men deal
with their nature alone, and apart. Ignorance and misprision are the norms.

As I said, to believe that men deal with their nature alone
and apart reaches a breathtaking level of ignorance.

For your edification I add a couple of pictures of Andrea Dworkin, who Marche takes to be an authority about male libido. Tell me now, doesn't the second picture look like a mug shot?

Monday, November 27, 2017

Harvey Weinstein has no shame. Charley Rose has no shame. Bill
Clinton and Kevin Spacey and Brett Ratner and Al Franken and Roy Moore clearly lack a sense of shame.

As of now they have all been called out and exposed. Most of
them have seen their reputations obliterated. As we see this we ought
at the least to understand that the therapy culture war on shame, its effort to
rid our people of their sense of modesty, propriety, decorum and humility…
among other virtues… has produced a cultural monstrosity.

Those who have promoted shamelessness believe, to the depths
of their marrow, that we can regulate human behavior by enhancing our sense of guilt. And,
by the by, with an extra dollop of empathy. In truth the culture of guilt
is running wild in America. People are not encouraged to behave well. They are
attacked, excoriated, indicted and punished for committing thought crimes—that is,
for racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic expressions. Punishing people for getting it wrong tells them nothing about how to get it right.

In many ways the worst part of the current debate is how
profoundly ignorant it is. I am not speaking about the man or woman on the
street, who does not spend his or her days pondering arcane philosophical
matters. I am thinking of psycho professionals, people like Brene Brown, a
woman who pretends to be an expert on shame while knowing nothing about it.
Brown knows that shame feels bad and thus that we should rid ourselves of it,
and of any concern for how we look to others. Take that thought to a logical
extreme and you have Harvey Weinstein dropping a bath towel in front of an
unwilling aspiring actress and you have a generation of teenagers who have so
completely overcome their sense of shame that they are sending naked pictures
to whomever.

Of course, there is no excuse for such ignorance. After all,
Ruth Benedict defined the terms clearly over seven decades ago in her masterful
book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
I wrote about it myself in my books on Saving
Face and The Last Psychoanalyst.
As for the concept of empathy, which somehow has managed to weasel its way into
discussions of shame, Paul Bloom has explained it well in his book, Against Empathy.

And yet, Dr. Perri Klass’s article about how guilt and
empathy will naturally produce good behavior bristles with ignorance. She
properly chooses to consult with people who are recognized as experts in the
field. Yet, we discover that nearly none of them can think straight. Or better,
can think at all.

To be extra specially clear, guilt is a form of anxiety. It
arrives when you have done something wrong, that is, when you have broken a
taboo, when you have transgressed, when you have committed a crime and when you
are anticipating punishment. You can of course be pronounced guilty and suffer
the punishment without feeling especially badly about anything more than
getting caught. And, as I have often pointed out, anticipating punishment does
not do a very good job of preventing you from committing crimes. It puts a
price on transgression. And it sets down a level of risk. If you are willing to
accept the risk and to do the time, you are more likely to commit the crime.
Once you have paid your debt to society, as the saying goes, you are free to go
out and commit more crimes. Considering recidivism rates, that is what most criminals do.

Freud understood guilt perfectly well and made it the
centerpiece of his psychological theorizing. In this theory your wishes, to
commit patricide and incest, were criminal. You might control them by feeling
guilty but only up to a point. Most Freudian theory involves becoming more
aware of your criminal impulses and paying them off by what Freud called
symbolic castration… that is, a form of recycled penance. It had nothing to do with empathy.

Guilt does not tell you what you should do. It tells you
what not to do. Doing the right thing involves following codes of good
behavior, having good manners, being considerate in the terms that your culture
dictates. It has nothing to do with empathy.

In truth, as Paul Bloom argued persuasively, feelings of
empathy can turn you into a sadist. When you empathize with someone who is
being unjustly injured, you will want to punish the person who has committed
the injury. Your empathy will turn you into a raving sadist.

At the least, this should be clear. You cannot define
the concept of guilt without understanding how it functions in our culture. And
since we have a criminal justice system that determines guilt and not guilt, we
must if we are to be semi-coherent assure that our definitions are consistent
with the way the term is used there.

Unfortunately, such is not the case. Klass looks to child
development experts and she finds nothing but confusion. She does not say it this
way, but you should compare these theories of guilt with the theory I laid out
above:

Guilt
can be a complicated element in the parent-child equation; we feel guilty, they
feel guilty, we may make them feel guilty and then feel guilty about that. But
certain kinds of guilt are a healthy part of child development.

Tina
Malti, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who has studied
the development of
guilt in children, considers guilt an emotion similar to empathy.

“Moral
guilt is healthy, good to develop,” she said. “It helps the child refrain from
aggression, antisocial behavior.”

No mention of breaking laws. No mention of criminal
behavior. No mention of anything that makes any sense at all. No mention of parents telling their children Not to do something. No mention, in other words, of No. No mention of a child's testing boundaries.

At times guilt
can deter someone from sticking up the corner bodega, but that involves a
complex calculus of risk and reward. What are the chances of getting caught?
What are the advantages of committing the crime? What will the price be if he
is caught?

The psycho theorists believe that guilt makes children treat
people kindly. They are wrong. It might tell people not to hurt each other, or not to break the dishes, but
guilt does not teach them the good manners, the considerate and tactful
customary behaviors that constitute kindness. Children learn to behave well
because they want to belong, because they emulate their betters and because
they want to grow up.

Guilt might play a part, but the wish to grow up is
far more important:

… around
age 6. By then, she said, most children report guilt in response to
transgressions, and that can help them treat other people kindly. “There’s lots
of evidence that healthy guilt promotes children’s prosocial behavior,” she
said.

It doesn’t. Guilt does deter some forms of antisocial behavior,
if the price of getting caught is too high. But it does not teach prosocial
behaviors.

Just in case you forgot, here are the immortal words of
President Bill Clinton, from his 1995 State of the Union Address. They have
miraculously reappeared on the Moonbattery blog, via Maggie’s Farm:

All
Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in
this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens
entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or
legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.
That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more
by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many
criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring
welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we
will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested
for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended
by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. We are a
nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and
ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of
abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more
to stop it.

Today, Moonbattery says, those sentiments would put Clinton
to the right of Paul Ryan. How times have changed.

Being as this is a conservative blog, I make an effort to respect tradition. Even my own invented traditions.

Long time readers know that I have taken Cyber Monday—as in,
today—as the time to kick off my annual fundraising campaign. It will last for
the week, so you might see this same post repeated again and again as the week
goes on. Brace yourself.

It might not seem like it, but it takes considerable work to
produce these posts every day. For those who wish to support and even reward my
efforts I recommend a donation. It’s thoroughly in keeping with the holiday
spirit.

If you click on the orange Donate button on the left side of this page, the kind folks at
Paypal will help you to contribute as much as you would like.

If you do not wish to use Paypal, I gratefully accept checks
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Sunday, November 26, 2017

There’s no method to the transgender madness. Things are
getting so bad that The Economist is calling for a halt to the sexual mutilation. They,
as we are especially concerned that children who are brainwashed into thinking
that they are transgender are subjected to biochemical abuse… thus making it
far more difficult, if not impossible to return to their birth gender.

Research has shown that a large majority of children who
call themselves transgender will change their minds, so what purpose is served by
removing this choice… and basing it on a child’s belief. Transgender activists
and especially the physicians who are practicing this monstrosity should be
indicted and jailed.

Gender
reassignment is a momentous choice, since it causes irreversible physical
changes and, if surgery is done to reshape the genitalia, perhaps also
sterility. For gender-dysphoric children the clock is ticking, since puberty
moulds bodies in ways no drugs or scalpel can undo. Waiting until adulthood to
start the transition therefore means worse results.

Some
clinics buy time with puberty-blockers, which suppress the action of sex
hormones. But these may have harmful side-effects. Furthermore, most
gender-dysphoric children will probably not become transgender adults. Studies
are scarce and small, but suggest that, without treatment, a majority will end
up comfortable in their birth sex, so treatment would be harmful. Unfortunately,
no one knows how to tell which group is which. Yet some trans activists have
thrown caution to the wind. Specialists who start by trying to help
gender-dysphoric children settle in their birth identities, rather than making
a speedy switch, risk being labelled transphobes and forced out of their jobs.
Few are willing to say that some such children may actually be suffering from a
different underlying problem, such as anorexia or depression.

Won’t
someone think of the children?

It is
bad enough that doctors, parents and gender-dysphoric children must make
high-stakes choices against time without good evidence about what will happen.
Worse is that children’s plight is being used by adults as an opportunity for
moral grandstanding. The child’s interests depend not on the feelings of
transgender activists—nor those of feminists—but on facts that still need to be
established. Doctors need to know more about how to tell when gender dysphoria
is likely to persist. Until they have that information, they should not rush in
with drugs. Before acting, doctors should have reasonable grounds for thinking
that they are doing good.

Yes, indeed. No one thinking of the
children. We count it as fortunate that a high prestige publication like the
Economist is calling out this postmodern madness.

Articles
about America’s high levels of child poverty are a media evergreen. Here’s a
typical entry, courtesy of the New
York Times’s Eduardo Porter: “The percentage of children who are poor is
more than three times as high in the United States as it is in Norway or the
Netherlands. America has a larger proportion of poor children than Russia.”
That’s right: Russia.

What has caused the increase in child poverty? You guessed
it: immigration. Not immigration of educated Asians, but increased immigration
from Latin America.

Hymowitz continues:

The
lousy child-poverty numbers should come with another qualifying asterisk,
pointing to a very American reality. Before Europe’s recent migration crisis,
the United States was the only developed country consistently to import
millions of very poor, low-skilled families, from some of the most destitute
places on earth—especially from undeveloped areas of Latin America—into its
communities, schools, and hospitals. Let’s just say that Russia doesn’t care to
do this—and, until recently, Norway and the Netherlands didn’t, either. Both
policymakers and pundits prefer silence on the relationship between America’s
immigration system and poverty, and it’s easy to see why. The subject pushes us
headlong into the sort of wrenching trade-offs that politicians and advocates
prefer to avoid.

She continues: we have been importing child poverty:

Here’s
the problem in a nutshell: you can allow mass low-skilled immigration, which
many on the left and the right—and probably most poverty mavens—consider humane
and quintessentially American. But if you do, pursuing the equally humane goal
of substantially reducing child poverty becomes a lot harder.

More poor Hispanic children means more child poverty:

Perhaps
the most uncomfortable truth about these figures, and surely one reason they
don’t often show up in media accounts, is that a large majority of America’s
poor immigrant children—and, at this point, a large fraction of all its poor
children—are Hispanic (see chart below). The U.S. started collecting separate
poverty data on Hispanics in 1972. That year, 22.8 percent of those originally
from Spanish-language countries of Latin America were poor. The percentage
hasn’t risen that dramatically since then; it’s now at 25.6 percent. But
because the Hispanic population in America quintupled during those years, these
immigrants substantially expanded the nation’s poverty rolls. Hispanics are now
the largest U.S. immigrant group by far—and the lowest-skilled. Pew estimates
that Hispanics accounted for more than half the 22-million-person rise in the
official poverty numbers between 1972 and 2012. Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post found that,
between 1990 and 2016, Hispanics drove nearly three-quarters of the increase in
the nation’s poverty population from 33.6 million to 40.6 million.

The problem is cultural. While certain immigrant groups, the
Chinese and the Vietnamese, value education, Hispanic parents do not. They do
not talk with their children as much and do not much care about academic achievement.
In an economy where low skilled jobs are vanishing and where social mobility
depends on a higher level of education these cultural characteristics damage
children’s future prospects. Unless, of course, these children do the only jobs
that seem open to those less-educated—criminal enterprise.

Hymowitz writes:

According
to a study in the Hispanic
Journal of Behavioral Sciences, Hispanic parents don’t talk and read to
their young children as much as typical middle-class parents, who tend to
applaud their children’s attempts at self-expression, do; differences in verbal
ability show up as early as age two. Hispanic parents of low-achieving
students, most of whom also voiced high academic hopes for their kids, were
still “happy with their children’s test scores even when the children performed
poorly.” Their children tended to be similarly satisfied. Unlike many other
aspiring parents, Hispanics are more reluctant to see their children travel to
magnet schools and to college. They also become parents at younger ages. Though
Hispanic teen birthrates have fallen—as they have for all groups, apart from
American Indians—they remain the highest in the nation.

One would like to think that less educated Hispanics can
overcome their handicaps by gaining more education. And yet, after a second
generation has managed to raise itself through education, we often see that the
third generation reverts to the cultural norm.

The immigration question is not just about any old
immigrants. The Trump administration wants to admit immigrants who have a high
education level. Immigration activists seem to believe that all people are
equal and that mere exposure to American education can raise everyone and make
every immigrant child into a world beater.

Hymowitz concludes:

Outcomes
like these suggest that immigration optimists have underestimated the
difficulty of integrating the less-educated from undeveloped countries, and
their children, into advanced economies. A more honest accounting raises tough
questions. Should the United States, as the Trump administration is proposing,
and as is already the case in Canada and Australia, pursue a policy favoring
higher-skilled immigration? Or do we accept higher levels of child poverty and
lower social mobility as a cost of giving refuge and opportunity to people with
none? If we accept such costs, does it even make sense to compare our
child-poverty numbers with those of countries like Denmark or Sweden, which
have only recently begun to take in large numbers of low-skilled immigrants?

Angelo Codevilla has a unique perspective on the current
rash of sexual harassment accusations. Having worked for years on the Senate
staff he was well place to witness the trade… in sex for power. And he points
out that this trade took place because many female staffers found powerful men
to be attractive. In some cases they happily offered to trade their intimacy
for power.

Under the circumstances any man who tried to force an unwilling
woman to do his bidding was, by definition, a loser. Or, has to be as unattractive as Harvey Weinstein.

In the current frenzy this perspective is often elided. So,
here’s Codevilla:

During
my eight years on the Senate staff, sex was a currency for renting rungs on
ladders to power. Uninvolved and with a hygroscopic shoulder, I listened to
accounts of the trade, in which some one-third of senators, male senior staff,
and corresponding numbers of females seemed to be involved. I write “trade,”
because not once did I hear of anyone forcing his attention. Given what seemed
an endless supply of the willing, anyone who might feel compelled to do that
would have been a loser otherwise unfit for survival in that demanding
environment.

Senior
female staffers were far more open than secretaries in describing their
conquests of places up the ladder, especially of senators. There was some
reticence only in talking about “relationships” with such as John Tower
(R-Texas) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.) because they were the easiest, and had so
many. The prize, of course, was Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)—rooster over a veritable
hen house that was, almost literally, a “chick magnet.” Access to power, or
status, or the appearance thereof was on one side, sex on the other. Innocence
was the one quality entirely absent on all sides….

In the
basic bargain, the female proposes. The power holder has the prerogative to say
“no,” or just to do nothing. By a lesser token, wealthy men need not offer cash
to have female attention showered on them. Money is silver currency. Power is
gold. A few, occasionally, get impatient and grab. But taking egregious
behavior as the norm of the relationship between power and sex willfully
disregards reality. Banish the grabbing, and the fundamental reality remains
unchanged.

Saturday, November 25, 2017

If you want to know what the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman has to say about the reforms he is imposing on his country, you have to
read the insufferable cloying prose of one Thomas Friedman. Obviously, the New
York Times works well as an intermediary for the young Crown Prince. So we will
break with our longstanding policy—the only Friedman we read is George—and make
an exception. But just for today.

Naturally, Friedman is amazed and confused to see that the
Arab Spring is coming to Saudi Arabia. In truth, the Arab Spring is not coming
to Saudi Arabia. As Friedman remarks the original Arab Spring, mismanaged by the inept Obama administration and its incompetent Secretary of
State—Hillary Clinton—was a bottom-up movement. Saudi reforms are top-down. It’s
not the same thing. Yet, whereas the Arab Spring failed, the Saudi reform
movement might just succeed. Friedman says correctly that we should all want it
to succeed.

It’s not merely that liberal democracy is not coming to
Saudi Arabia. As is happening with many other authoritarian reform movements,
social and economic liberalization is often accompanied by an intolerance of dissent. Jaroslav Trofimov wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

In
asserting himself over Saudi Arabia, 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman is imposing a trade-off that appeals to many fellow young Saudis.

The
prince, in essence, is broadening social liberties in exchange for closing off
the limited political freedoms that existed in the Saudi kingdom.

That is
an approach that has worked for other Gulf monarchies, most notably the United
Arab Emirates. There, no hint of political dissent is tolerated but social and
religious rules are relatively relaxed. Women enjoy many rights denied to them
in Saudi Arabia. An abundance of entertainment and shopping options keeps
potential troublemakers busy.

As nations around the world look at the workings
of liberal democracy in America and in Western Europe they say that they do not want it to enter their cultures.

Speaking to Friedman, MBS explained that his
anti-corruption drive was not a power grab:

Our
country has suffered a lot from corruption from the 1980s until today. The
calculation of our experts is that roughly 10 percent of all government
spending was siphoned off by corruption each year, from the top levels to the
bottom. Over the years the government launched more than one ‘war on
corruption’ and they all failed. Why? Because they all started from the bottom
up….

My
father saw that there is no way we can stay in the G-20 and grow with this
level of corruption. In early 2015, one of his first orders to his team was to
collect all the information about corruption — at the top. This team worked for
two years until they collected the most accurate information, and then they
came up with about 200 names.

What are the stakes? Friedman explains:

The
stakes are high for M.B.S. in this anticorruption drive. If the public feels
that he is truly purging corruption that was sapping the system and doing so in
a way that is transparent and makes clear to future Saudi and foreign investors
that the rule of law will prevail, it will really instill a lot of new
confidence in the system. But if the process ends up feeling arbitrary,
bullying and opaque, aimed more at aggregating power for power’s sake and
unchecked by any rule of law, it will end up instilling fear that will unnerve
Saudi and foreign investors in ways the country can’t afford.

And Friedman makes a point that has previously been
reported. Namely, the kingdom’s subjects, to a man and a woman, support the
Crown Prince:

But one
thing I know for sure: Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days
expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive. The
Saudi silent majority is clearly fed up with the injustice of so many princes
and billionaires ripping off their country. While foreigners, like me, were
inquiring about the legal framework for this operation, the mood among Saudis I
spoke with was: “Just turn them all upside down, shake the money out of their
pockets and don’t stop shaking them until it’s all out!”

Perhaps more importantly, MBS is reforming Islam, making it
more moderate and more tolerant. He is bringing it into the modern world:

This
anticorruption drive is only the second-most unusual and important initiative
launched by M.B.S. The first is to bring Saudi Islam back to its more open and
modern orientation — whence it diverted in 1979. That is, back to what M.B.S.
described to a recent global investment conference here as a “moderate,
balanced Islam that is open to the world and to all religions and all
traditions and peoples.”

And also:

He has
not only curbed the authority of the once feared Saudi religious police to
berate a woman for not covering every inch of her skin, he has also let women
drive. And unlike any Saudi leader before him, he has taken the hard-liners on
ideologically. As one U.S.-educated 28-year-old Saudi woman told me: M.B.S.
“uses a different language. He says, ‘We are going to destroy extremism.’ He’s
not sugar-coating. That is reassuring to me that the change is real.”

Indeed,
M.B.S. instructed me: “Do not write that we are ‘reinterpreting’ Islam — we are
‘restoring’ Islam to its origins — and our biggest tools are the Prophet’s
practices and [daily life in] Saudi Arabia before 1979.” At the time of the
Prophet Muhammad, he argued, there were musical theaters, there was mixing
between men and women, there was respect for Christians and Jews in Arabia.
“The first commercial judge in Medina was a woman!” So if the Prophet embraced
all of this, M.B.S. asked, “Do you mean the Prophet was not a Muslim?”

To the evident chagrin of Obama flunky Friedman MBS admires
and credits President Donald Trump. To repeat a point already
made repeatedly, the Riyadh anti-terrorism confab extended a hand of friendship
to Trump. When pictures of Trump and the King were festooned throughout Riyadh
the message of friendship was unmistakable.

Friedman writes:

His
general view seemed to be that with the backing of the Trump administration — he
praised President Trump as “the right person at the right time” — the Saudis
and their Arab allies were slowly building a coalition to stand up to Iran. I
am skeptical. The dysfunction and rivalries within the Sunni Arab world
generally have prevented forming a unified front up to now, which is why Iran
indirectly controls four Arab capitals today — Damascus, Sana, Baghdad and
Beirut. That Iranian over-reach is one reason M.B.S. was scathing about Iran’s
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Next, MBS uttered the words that flashed around the world:

Iran’s
“supreme leader is the new Hitler of the Middle East,” said M.B.S. “But we
learned from Europe that appeasement doesn’t work. We don’t want the new Hitler
in Iran to repeat what happened in Europe in the Middle East.”

Considering that America’s left thinking intelligentsia
considers Donald Trump to be Hitler—when it does not consider him to be worse
than Hitler—the news that Ayatollah Khamenei is the real Hitler must have shocked Friedman’s delicate sensibility.

Because, after all, if Khamenei is Hitler and if even a
thirty-two year old knows that appeasement doesn’t work, you do not need to
activate too many little gray cells to recognize who played the role of Neville
Chamberlain, trying to appease the Iranian Hitler. Yes, indeed, the greatest
appeaser was none other than Barack Hussein Obama. Who knew?

Friedman closes with some words from young Saudis. We note
that a primary impetus behind the reforms is the shame that attends them for
being associated with the public reputation of Islam, reputation that has been damaged by terrorism. For those who believe that shame is
bad, we note here, that while nations reform for many reasons, one primary reason
is that they want to enhance their reputations to other people.

This
reform push is giving the youth here a new pride in their country, almost a new
identity, which many of them clearly relish. Being a Saudi student in post-9/11
America, young Saudis confess, is to always feel you are being looked at as a
potential terrorist or someone who comes from a country locked in the Stone
Age.

Now
they have a young leader who is driving religious and economic reform, who
talks the language of high tech, and whose biggest sin may be that he wants to
go too fast. Most ministers are now in their 40s — and not 60s. And with the
suffocating hand of a puritanical Islam being lifted, it’s giving them a chance
to think afresh about their country and their identity as Saudis.